FROM THE PUBLISHER’S DESK The “Moth Effect” It’s real and your life hangs in the balance. Every night in America, at least one, sometimes multiple, emergency vehicles will be struck while parked alongside a highway. Sixty percent of those accidents will involve an intoxicated driver. The remaining 40% are either distracted drivers or drivers that experienced what experts call the moth effect. Just last week, a Deputy with Harris County Constables Pct. 8 was parked on the shoulder of the Harris County Beltway 8 tollway when a highway work crew plowed into her Chevy Tahoe. The impact crushed the doors and the vehicle immediately caught fire. Had it not been for the quick actions of a nearby wrecker driver, Deputy K. LeMelle would have surely lost her life. Last year, on a different section of the same tollway, Deputy Jennifer Chavis from Harris County Constable’s Pct. 7 lost her life when her Tahoe was rear ended by a drunk driver and burst into flames. Despite desperate attempts by citizens and other officers to free her, the fire was too intense, and she perished in the vehicle. So why are drunks, and sometimes completely sober drivers, slamming into hundreds of emergency vehicles on a nightly basis? A recent study showed drivers were drawn to the emer- gency lights like a moth to a flame. All drivers may have experienced this effect and just not realized it. You’re driving home at night. It’s darker than a coal mine at midnight when, in the distance, you see flashing red lights off to the side of the road. As the lights draw closer, you notice how bright they are. You’re mesmerized by the lights and suddenly you realize how close they are. You’re almost on the shoulder and coming up fast on the emergency vehicles. You swerve to regain your lane and avoid running into the parked police car with tons of flashing lights. According to some experts, you’ve just experienced “the moth effect.” Like the moths, experts maintain that motorists are attracted to bright lights, whether it’s the flashing lights of a police car or the stadium lighting of a construction zone. Even cops are guilty of rubbernecking at accident scenes, but at night it can be deadly if distracted for if only for a second or two. During the day, our eyes are able to process not only all that is happening on the shoulder, but we’re able to gauge our speed and distance relative to vehicles and people. We can MICHAEL BARRON gauge what lane we’re in and we can gauge how close we are to the parked vehicles and whether we need to move to the left. At night, it’s a different story. There are no objects to focus on. There is a minimal flow of optic information. It’s the same as driving at night in the rain. You just can’t see well, so you’re forced to rely on those objects you can identify. In the case of a crash, it’s those flashing lights. Theories suggest that fixating on these identifiable objects causes you to forget all the other factors that go into driving: maintaining speed, maintaining lane position. Instead, you focus on the lights and so you “aim” for them. Tom Vanderbilt writes in his book, “Traffic,” that “the simplest explanation may be that most drivers, upon seeing a car on the highway, assume that it is moving at the same high speed as everyone else — and cars with flashing lights are usually moving even faster than that.” This optical illusion proves your assumptions false because the vehicles are, in fact, stopped. He also notes that we tend to look longer at dramatic things, such as a bad crash, meaning that the longer we become distracted, the harder it is to maintain direction. Researchers have been studying the effect for decades, all the way back to B2 pilots in World War II, who spoke of becoming fixated on the lead plane and navigating toward it. Today, researchers look at its effects on motorists. In 2008, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute studied the effects of warning lamp color and intensity on driver vision. Variables included color and intensity of light. Participants were asked to differentiate, as quickly as possible, whether the flashing lights were on the right or left side of an emergency vehicle. They were then asked to differentiate whether an emergency responder was standing on the right or left side of the vehicle. As expected, participants were better able to differentiate the lights at night and the pedestrians during the day. When color was added to the equation, blue markings were the most easily distinguishable, followed by yellow, red and white. Researchers suggested equipping all emergency vehicles with blue lights, as is common in Europe. They also suggested that blue lights might prevent the moth effect, in which drivers would mistake red lights for vehicle taillights and follow them off the road and into the emergency personnel. According to the ODMP website, 31 police officers were struck by vehicles and killed while directing traffic or assisting motorists to date in 2022. There were 61 in 2021 and 46 in 2020. “The moth effect may be a pop phrase, but the phenomenon is real,” said Jack Sullivan, director of training for the Cumberland Valley (Va.) Volunteer Firemen’s Association’s Emergency Responder Safety Institute and one of the nation’s leading experts. Regardless of what you call it, every time you work an accident, make a traffic stop or just park on a highway at night, your chance of being hit are 90% greater than they are in daylight. Working accidents at night is just part of the job. Not much you can do about it, other than have your head on a swivel the entire time you’re out there. But when it comes to traffic stops on a busy highway, maybe moving the violator off to the frontage road is a better option and might just save your life. And finally, I say to the departments that require their night shift officers to make dozens of traffic stops. Is the revenue gained from a ticket worth your officers’ life? I think not. 6 The BLUES The BLUES 7
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